


Solving Your Life One Problem At A Time

by laiqualaurelote



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 04:24:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/974300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laiqualaurelote/pseuds/laiqualaurelote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Donny pulls a Sweeney Todd, Wicki gives career counselling and Utivich discovers a new calling in life.  UnKino!AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solving Your Life One Problem At A Time

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in an AU in which Operation Kino did not happen (i.e. In Real History). Because even a Basterd fandom needs fix-it AUs. Warning for anachronistic pop culture references, OCs, ostentatious Pulp Fiction crossovering, bunnies, I’m-fairly-sure-Americans-don’t-actually-talk-like-this.

People say crazy things when they think they’re about to die. Like the time a sniper got Donny through the chest and Utivich had to sit up with him all night while he raved like a maniac, and then right before dawn he grabbed Utivich’s hand and said, with astonishing clarity, “Like I was saying, shoulda asked you earlier, we could set up after this was over, back in the, come to Boston, be nice.” Whereupon he passed out and Utivich seriously thought he was dead, and it wasn’t until the lieutenant clocked him one in the face and said, “Look, kid, he’s breathin’ normal” that he calmed down.

Donny of course did not die, on account of him being Donny. Nor did he mention his near-death suggestion again, so Utivich didn’t bring it up either; he didn’t want to ruin anything, and in any case it was highly unlikely that they would both make it through the war. Donny might be unkillable, but he himself certainly wasn’t.

And then he went on to survive the war and return to Manhattan, where he received a hero’s welcome and all the pie he could eat, and his parents made it clear that - even though compared to a medical certificate or a degree in accountancy, a hundred Nazi scalps didn’t quite cut it – all things considered, they were still fairly proud of him. And after a month and a half, Utivich wrote a couple of explanatory letters, packed his things and got on a train to Boston.

When he showed up on Donny’s doorstep, it was near closing time and Donny was dumping razorblades in boiling water. When Utivich came in, he raised one fearsome eyebrow and said, as if offhand, “Whaddya doing here?”

“I thought I’d take you up on your offer.”

“Thought you was getting married,” stated Donny, soaking broodingly. “Your girl run off with some other fucker while you’re off killin’ Krauts?”

“No. Maybe. Whatever,” said Utivich. “In any case I wasn’t interested any more, so I called it off.”

Donny did give him a real look now. He started walking towards Utivich, who noticed that he was still holding the razors in one hand, dripping and steaming, Donny came right up to him and Utivich was thinking that t _his was a really bad idea, wow, didn’t know he’d moved on to razors now_  – and then Donny palmed a razor with casual menace and said: “Well, I don’t know what you’re expecting me to do, because I sure as hell ain’t gonna marry you.”

“That’s okay,” said Utivich. He was getting used to the idea that nobody would ever make an honest man out of him.

 

* * *

 

Three months passed. Utivich moved into Donny’s room above the shop. Donny’s extended family didn’t exactly queue up to embrace him with open arms and sing Hava Nagila, but they didn’t seem particularly surprised either. Donny’s father and multitudinous older brothers largely ignored him, but Utivich made friends with the Donowitz family pet, a geriatric and incontinent rabbit called Pebbles who lived in a cage on the staircase, and Donny’s sister Leah. He got a job at the bookstore further down the street. His parents stopped trying to call after the first month.

“I approve,” Leah informed him one night, as he was helping her sweep hair off the floor of the shop.

“Oh?” said Utivich absent-mindedly, attacking the wispy layers of fuzz under the counter.

Leah leaned on her broom and regarded him. She bore a remarkable resemblance to Donny, which looked rather odd on a girl – especially those eyebrows – but Utivich would have agreed she was more or less a handsome young lady. “My brother, he’s a tough pitcher,” stated Leah cryptically. “Not many who can field what he likes to throw.” She fixed Utivich with an analytical stare. “You, though, you look like you catch wicked fine.”

“Uh,” said Utivich. Clearly he was going to have to give this analogy more thought. “Thanks?”

Leah gave him the lopsided Donowitz grin and nudged his broom. “You missed a spot.”

Sometimes Utivich would drop by the shop during lunch break and see the heads seated in rows. In his mind, the knife would find all the right scalp marks of its own accord, the angles of saw, the long arc of the slice, the blade edging free and then you could just take hold of that hair and peel.

Utivich thought these things with scientific precision, his hands barely twitching. He could feel that it was different in Donny, a sort of restless energy that hitting stumps in the backyard would not take off. Donny at work in the barbershop was something that put one’s teeth on edge; the way he loomed over everyone, over the colourless customers waiting for a shave – so extremely vital, so full of angry life. This was a man you would never, in your right mind, never let near your jugular with a razor. Utivich thought the customers total fools for not picking up on this.

 

* * *

 

One night, Utivich came back from work and the front door was locked.

This was surprising, because the shop was usually open till late. Still, Utivich had a key, so he let himself in the side door.

The shop was dark. Utivich could hear low voices in heated argument in the back. He picked his way towards their sound, edging around the dark shadows of chairs, padding through the carpet of hair – they hadn’t cleaned up yet? – until he stepped on something which went  _squelch_ and most definitely wasn’t _all_  hair.

Utivich froze.

Then he marched into the back and said, “What the hell?”

The people arguing were Donny and Leah. Donny had his back to him, so Leah saw him first; her eyes widened in shock, and Donny spun around as if on instinct, fist swinging out. Utivich ducked it with the ease of long practice and tackled Donny up against the wall before he could deliver that killer uppercut of his. “It’s me,” he hissed. “Now what the fuck did you do?”

Some of the tension went out of Donny, though not all. “He’s kinda dead, I think.”

Leah made a snort along the lines of “hell yeah, kinda”.

Utivich got off Donny. “Who’s – who was he?”

Donny shrugged. “Some guy.”

And yes, it would be just Utivich’s luck that the love of his life had turned out to to be a murdering psychopath after all. Then again, he already knew that.

“Hey, fucker was asking for it,” continued Donny, who at least seemed to feel obliged to explain himself. “He was after Leah.”

Leah threw up her hands in exasperation. “He was making a pass!”

“He was fucking grabbing at you, is what,” retorted Donny. “Am I supposed to sit round while some asshole feels my sister up like a piece of meat? You like that?”

“Shut your face, no,” snapped Leah. “But it wasn’t nothing big, he’s been doing that since you was away serving – hell, not just him, now you gonna massacre half the goddamn neighbourhood for copping a feel?”

The prospect seemed to brighten Donny up more than was healthy, so Utivich changed the subject. “Well, uh. This is a problem.”

They went back into the shop and Donny turned on the light. Leah made a choking noise and turned away.

“Don’t feel right, do it?” remarked Donny conversationally to Utivich. “I almost got to scalping him, till I realised – no need for it, the Lieutenant ain’t here.”

“Yeah,” said Utivich absent-mindedly. The head was almost all gone, mashed into the floor. The weapon of choice appeared to have been a stool, now lying on its side with a broken leg. There was blood on the mirrors.

“We clean this up first,” he said. “Then we got to get you out of here.”

“Fuck a duck,” said Donny with conviction. “Fuck a…fucking turkey or something, I’m staying put.”

“You got to blow town,” Utivich insisted. “Get on the lam. All that stuff.”

Donny stared him down. “The Bear Jew don’t fucking run.”

“They’ll charge you and hang you till you’re dead,” supplied Leah caustically.

“Yeah,” said Donny. “So?”

Utivich played his trump card. At least, he hoped it mattered enough to be a trump card. “Then you’ll never see me again.”

He left Donny to mull this over and went into the back to find detergent.

 

* * *

 

In France, they had never had to clean up after themselves. In fact, the whole point was to leave the bodies lying around, brains spilling out onto the grass or intestines dangling like garters where the lieutenant’s bowie knife had got a little too friendly, red scalped flesh showing like strawberries. It was the ‘mess’ in ‘message’.

This was different. Utivich, however, was masterclass at adapting to the situation.

Since they weren’t going to be able to drag the corpse out without someone noticing, the only thing to do was to draw apart the body. Utivich had to send Leah out for this bit – he told her to go borrow a car at all costs, and after she had set off, he and Donny got every sharp-edged object in the house down into the shop and set to work.

When Leah got back, Donny was upstairs packing. Utivich was cutting off the corpse’s fingertips with Donny’s grandmother’s gardening shears and getting ready to burn them; he had a vague idea that it would make the guy harder to identify. Leah stopped short in the door, said “ _Yeesh_ ” very faintly and ducked back out.

“Sorry,” began Utivich, and began shovelling the fingertips out of sight. For some reason he was thinking of the time the lieutenant had given them their first scalping workshop and he had been sick on Omar’s boots later – all things considered, Leah was holding up quite impressively. Then again, she was a Donowitz. “You can come in now.”

Leah came in, shuddered and tossed him the keys. “It’s Cousin Avi’s,” she informed him. “I told him we needed to take Pebbles to the vet.”

It was a good hour and half before they could proceed with Pebbles’ road trip, because they had to go over every surface in the shop twice, and goddamn if brain matter didn’t get in the weirdest places. Utivich painstakingly brushed the floor with detergent, starting at the edges of the stains and working inwards like he’d learned at home, while Leah scrubbed the mirrors with newspaper and Donny was generally unhelpful. And then they had to burn their clothing, and pack the three sacks of body parts into the trunk (the stool wouldn’t fit, so they had to leave it in the back seat. Utivich got Pebbles’s cage and put it on top of the stool, for appearances.)

They rolled one sack into every ravine they passed on the road out of the city, and dropped the stool into a river. Leah saw them off at the train station, holding an agitated Pebbles under her arm.

“You, uh,” said Donny. “You explain this to Pop, all right? And you take care of him? And of you?”

“Donny,” said Leah, and burst into tears, “you’re a goddamn retard.”

Utivich left to get their tickets, feeling like he was intruding.

On the train out, Donny said once, “God, I fucked up, didn’t I?” and Utivich, not knowing how to contradict this, got hold of his hand and gripped it while the scenery whizzed past in the dark. Neither said anything else the whole journey.

 

* * *

 

In a situation like this, Utivich would have consulted the lieutenant first. The lieutenant, however, had returned to Maynardville, Tennessee to moonshine, bootleg, and other compound noun activities of an illegal nature. Utivich did not know how to get to Maynardville, Tennessee. Most respectable maps did not even like to admit that it existed.

Instead, they went to see Wicki.

“Sorry we didn’t call or anything,” began Utivich on showing up unannounced on Wicki’s doorstep (becoming a habit, this), “but, uh, it was a spur-of-the-moment kinda decision – ” and Wicki merely smiled his thin-lipped smile and let them in.

Wicki lived in a tastefully furnished apartment in Chicago, in which Utivich and Donny were now awkwardly seated and making polite small talk. Since their last parting, he had somehow succeeded in morphing into a respectable businessman, which evidently dismayed Donny to no end. Post-War Wicki was the perfect opposite of Post-War Donowitz. Utivich had always suspected Wicki of being good at compartmentalizing.

Utivich was not sure of what to make of Post-War Wicki, who dressed better but still sported the same I-know-what-you-did-last-summer-and-then-some smile, which Utivich had always found the creepiest thing about Wicki. It was a completely different sort of smile from Donny’s (which at full strength was hundred-percent pure maniac and belonged in a pulp illustration captioned MUHAHAHAHAHA in excitable font) but it was equally dangerous. Back in France, Utivich had often wondered what it was about dangerous people and smiling. Then again, there were dangerous people who didn’t do any smiling – like the lieutenant, who made do with some sort of upper-lip-curling grimace – or Stiglitz. Stiglitz had never been introduced to the smile. If he had, Utivich had no doubt that he would have stuck his knife down its throat and smeared its eyeballs on the nearest tree before it had even shaken his hand.

Stiglitz had stayed with Wicki for a while, on account of him not having anywhere to stay in America. Utivich would have put money on Stiglitz, not Donny, being the first of them to snap, but Stiglitz had pre-empted him there by going to Indonesia.

Utivich had no idea what the hell anybody would want to do in Indonesia. Since Stiglitz was not in the habit of writing, he was never going to find out.

When Donny was rattling around in Wicki’s kitchen looking for more beer, Utivich took the chance to say to their host, “I think he has a problem.”

Wicki took a drag on his cigarette. The smell reminded Utivich of taking watch on cold French mornings, leaning against a tree cradling his automatic while Wicki shielded the tip of his cigarette with his hand in case a patrol spotted the light. “Who, the sarge?”

“The life doesn’t suit him.”

“Ah,” said Wicki. “I see something happened.”

During the war, Utivich would have trusted Wicki with his life. He wasn’t so sure about Post-War Wicki, but he had to take the chance. “Yeah. He can’t go back now.”

Wicki quirked his lip in amusement, snatched a piece of paper off the bureau and copied a few lines from his address book onto it. He handed it to Utivich. “Try this.”

Utivich read it. After a while he said, “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s that,” replied Wicki, “or Indonesia.” He shrugged expansively. “I’m just saying.”

 

* * *

 

And that was how they became hitmen.

Donny did most of the hitting, really. Utivich planned. He did research. He tailed the marks, which was where the stealth tactics they’d learnt from bushwhacking Nazi patrols came in handy. He copied keys. He arranged aliases. He got Donny into position and let fly.

When Donny was done, Utivich got rid of the evidence. He was getting particularly good at this part. There was a very nice feeling about putting everything back into order. Donny did not get this: while Utivich methodically sawed limbs off and used rubbing alcohol on the doorknobs, he would stalk around the place, buzzing with adrenaline from the kill, getting in the way until Utivich either threw him out or kissed him to make him shut up. The latter was more effective, but usually meant he had even more to clean up later on.

By the end of the first month, word had got round. They were making quite a bit.

Neither of them knew what to do with the money, so they bought a hairdryer and sent it to Leah with their love.

 

* * *

 

A long, long time later, they were under new fake names in some L.A. motel. Donny was screwing around with the ice bucket. Utivich answered a knock on the door and opened it to a young black man, totally bald.

“I been told,” he said smoothly, “that you offer a sound package.”

Utivich stared at him narrowly. He felt Donny come up behind him, looming, to growl: “Whaddya want?”

The black man smiled. “You must be the one they call the Bear.”

Utivich expected him to say ‘Jew’. So, from the expelled breath by his neck, did Donny. That had been a different name, though, a different lifetime altogether. To the contrary, in this lifetime nobody knew or cared that they were Jewish.

The black man glanced down at Utivich. “And you would be the – ”

“His partner,” snapped Utivich, before they started on that Little Man shit again. That would be hell for public relations.

The man produced a card. “I’mma set up my business in the area. Bound to run into some problems while I’m at it. I believe I could find great use for your services.”

“Thanks,” said Utivich dubiously, taking the card and reading it. “Marsellus Wallace.”

“That’s me,” said the man, and grinned. “I’ll be seeing y’all around.” He turned and walked down the corridor. There was a fresh plaster on the back of his head, like a target.

“Well, how ‘bout that,” mused Donny after a while. “We must be moving up in the world.”

“I need a new nickname,” said Utivich pointedly. “If you’re going to be the Bear Jew – the Bear – again. I should at least get a matching one.”

“Like what?” quipped Donny. “Goldilocks?”

“Fuck you,” said Utivich half-heartedly, and put the card into his wallet.

 

* * *

 

They’re waiting for the client in a diner. Utivich is dumping sugar by the spoonful into his coffee, which he knows will taste like disgusting shit anyway. Donny, who thinks all coffee is disgusting shit, is eating a donut and looking for cigarettes in Utivich’s jacket pockets. “D’you miss your folks?” Donny says, out of the blue.

“No,” says Utivich. He gives up on his coffee and puts the sugar back. “You?”

“Yeah,” answers Donny tersely.

Utivich takes off his glasses. He has taken to wearing dark glasses because they hide his eyes; this, strangely enough, was suggested to him by Donny, who had observed one day with brutal fondness: “It’s the eyes, you know, people would take you seriously if you quit looking at them like a fucking bushbaby.” Donny rarely made insightful comments. This one happened to be a stroke of genius.

Utivich takes off his glasses, leaves them on the table and turns to Donny. “We can go back, you know. It’s probably safe now, I don’t think they ever found him.”

Donny mashes the remaining donut between finger and thumb. “I can’t. You know.”

Utivich knows.

The door bangs open and their client enters the diner, approaches their booth and takes a seat, slightly out of breath. “Look, um,” he begins, “I got this problem.”

It has occurred to Utivich before that life with Donny is, in its own right, a giant problem. Utivich can’t say that it’s one he can fix, or should fix, or even remotely feels like fixing. Then again, all giant problems are made of tiny problems. And Utivich is pretty good at solving the tiny problems.

Utivich fits his dark glasses back on and turns back to the client. Donny’s arm resting on the back of the booth, solid behind his head. Utivich grins at the client.

“That’s okay. We solve problems.”


End file.
